Patricia McKillip

“He gazed intently at a sheet of paper, breath suspended, a word on the quivering point of his pen poised and waiting to fall. Monoliths of books and manuscripts rose around him. All were crammed with words; words packed as solidly as bricks in a wall. Armies of them; marching on from one page to the next without pause. He forced the pen in his tight grip a hairs’-breadth closer to the paper, so that the word stubbornly clinging to it might yield finally; flow onto the vast emptiness. Point and paper met, kissed, froze. He sat back, breath spilling abruptly out of him, the pen laden with unformed words dangling now over the floor in his lax fingers. How, he wondered incredulously, did all those books and papers come into existence? In what faceted jewel of amber secreted in what invisible compartment of what hidden casket did others find that one word to begin the sentence, that layered itself into a paragraph, that built itself into a page, that went on to the next page, and on, and on? ~The Bards of Bone Plain”

“I would be mute, beautiful, changless as the earth for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King's white house. I would do that for you and no other man inthe relm. But it would be a lie and I will do anything but lie to you - I swear that. ”

“Only yesterday a young woman came to me wanting a trap set for a man with a sweet smile and lithe arms. She was a fool, not for wanting him, but for wanting more of him than that.”

“But even in the schoolyard I'd been aware of that silence, that reserve in him, as though he'd been raised by foxes and language was his second language.”